Sell: Welcome New Leads with a Planned Follow-Up Strategy

Michael Faul
President

You worked hard to deploy a great marketing campaign and the phone rings, your inbox fills, or you start racking up registrations for your next seminar or webinar. Leads are heading inbound and your job is done, right? Not exactly. In fact, your job has just begun, and what you do next and how quickly you do it greatly increases or decreases your sales success. So we came up with some tips to help you maximize your ability to qualify and advance leads toward a sale.

Who took the bigger risk in forming this new relationship: you or your new lead? They just stepped out of the comfort of anonymity to provide you contact information and put their valuable time, energy, and privacy at risk. What your lead experiences first will determine if and how quickly you can replace that fear with trust. Achieving that objective determines when and if you can convert leads into sales. Here are four tips to help you build goodwill with new members of your lead generation community.

Get to know the people contacting you. When someone contacts you they tend to provide you limited contact information. You need to complete contact information and conduct some customer intelligence. Go to your lead’s website and:

· Complete all contact information,

· Make notes about their product or service offerings,

· Note if they have multiple office locations,

· Review their client list, and

· Check their leadership team

Use the information you gathered to personalize questions and comments for your first contact with your new lead. Being able to personalize your first contact will increase trust and differentiate you from the competition.

Roll out the welcome mat. Send every new member of your community a welcome letter or email. Set up your welcome letter or email as a template with mail merge fields. This allows you to generate personalized welcome notes with consistent messaging and little effort or time investment. In addition to welcoming new members, make them aware of other resources they may find valuable.

Provide new community members a copy of your privacy policy. This demonstrates your respect for their trust in you with their contact information. Also explain to them your keep-in-touch program, focusing on the benefits of being a member of your community. Invite them to participate by posting comments on your blog or other online forums and download relevant resources from your website.

Begin interacting with new community members—quickly. The longer you wait to contact a lead, the more dramatically your probability of converting them into a sale declines. How much time do you have? Research published by Insidesales.com and The Sloan School of Management at MIT indicates your probability of sales success begins to decline after the first 5 minutes of a new relationship. By the end of your first business day, your chances of qualifying the relationship can decline by more than 25% and the probability of realizing a sale by as much as 20%. Think about that: if you don’t pick up the phone to contact that lead, you become 1/5 less likely to win the deal. You need a process that ensures phone contact within the first business day of a new relationship.

Begin the process of qualifying leads. In Xsellerate’s community marketing model, anyone can enter your lead-generating community. They only need to exchange contact information with you. But, you still need to qualify your community membership. Qualifying leads is not meant to determine if they are “in” or “out” of the community; rather it determines “where they live” within the community.

Do not over-qualify on the first interaction. This tends to turn off your new lead. Rather, determine if you have only a relationship or if your new friend is a true prospect. To do this you need a check list that describes what a good prospect looks like to your business and which describes the behaviors manifested by a prospect. Work your checklist items into a series of qualification questions. You can learn about relationships and prospects at http://www.xselleratesolutions.com/resources.php.

Keep in mind qualification needs to take place throughout the entire sales process (a subject for a future article.) For your first interaction, work your positioning questions into the conversation. Interweave qualifying questions with informational statements so you don’t sound like you are interrogating your lead. Strategically leave some qualifying questions for your next interaction.

The first step in a strong lead management process involves receiving the lead into your community quickly and establishing a meaningful interaction. This needs to take place within the first business day of the relationship. The interaction should be used to initiate lead qualification, but must add additional value to the relationship while inviting the lead to interact with your organization. Properly executed, a strong lead intake process will increase your close rates and, ultimately, your growth rate.

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